The stories are made up, but the problems are real.

Entries tagged with my uncle has a barn

Because of all the Langston Hughes posts I made around the RNC, one of my friends sent me this information about a fundraiser to preserve Langston Hughes’s brownstone for an arts collective. Interesting stuff, and I thought some of you might want to know too.

It reminded me that some of you don’t know we’re trying to get an arts center and various other arts events/programming here in the south suburbs of Minneapolis, through the group Art Works Eagan. They’re still working on the building plan, but in the meantime they’re holding events like stilting demonstrations at the farmer’s market and who knows what kind of installation in early September–it will be a surprise to me, but they have the artist lined up. They’re always looking for volunteers and support.

Three is a good number, right? So while you’ve probably seen it, I’ll put this here: Pamela Dean is starting a Patreon to help her keep the lights on and the cats fed and vacuumed while she writes more of the things we’ve loved from her over the years. I’ve read parts of the books she’s getting into production with this project, and I want them. So all the help we can give will be useful.

I interviewed Max last summer when he wrote a book for my birthday, and look! he’s been kind enough to do it again! So here’s another interview with everyone’s favorite Max Gladstone, better than all the other Max Gladstones on your block.

1. Are you going to keep writing books for my birthday? I think this is a pretty good tradition.

Let’s make it a tradition! We can have cake and ice cream, maybe a sort of ritual where we dance around and buy books and give them to people! Honestly, it wouldn’t be that different from my current, less formal, but none the less annual ritual of publishing books, then sprinting around and waving my hands over my head saying, “hey, everybody! I think this is really cool!”

2. Is every story about gods about families?

Every story about gods is a story about communities—we’re born into some families and we choose others. Whatever else gods are, they’re at least things people do. We tend to confuse faith with propositional belief, as if the important element of, say, a Roman Republican’s religious life was her belief that these specific gods had these specific histories. For one thing, she had lots of blatantly contradictory stories to choose between! But more important than those mythical propositions, I think, or at the very least *as* important, were the fears and desires she wanted to understand and control, which expressed themselves in myth and ritual she learned, or invented. We all do this. We build ourselves from rituals our parents and friends teach us. We refine those rituals (which are stories, after all) as we pass them on. That’s the work of a family.

3. Nightmare matrices: I think that every former physicist or physics major hears this phrase and goes OH YES. Did that spring into your head fully formed, and do you want to say more about the concept? And is there any more of my undergraduate trauma you’re planning to mine?

Hah! I’d have to engage in further research on your undergraduate trauma specifically, but I spend a lot of time mining *my* undergraduate trauma, and the undergraduate trauma of my friends, for story ideas. That concept did spring into my mind full-formed, though it’s part of this long process of trying to work through how information technology works in the Craft Sequence. We’re basically playing around with the computational power of shared dreams (and shared nightmares). I’m really looking forward to getting into it much earlier.

4. So far you have not repeated any numbers. Do you have plans to do any books that are happening at roughly the same time but in different places/with different characters?

I am really interested in that! A possibility for later in the series. I’m torn at the moment—on the one hand I really want to expand the world, but on the other hand I’m trying to push into the future!

5. Let’s talk about your non-Craft projects. Do you have a different work process for serial and non-serial work, or are you writing your serialized things all at once and just releasing them serially?

I do have a different process for serial fiction! Though the different process mostly traces back to the fact that, with my Serial Box work, I’m writing alongside many other writers at one time. We write sets of episodes in parallel, and then we compare notes. It’s a convoluted dance, but I love seeing how other writers run with the story material—even after we’ve all shared outlines, the writers’ execution differs in wild and really cool ways.

6. You’ve had a few more short pieces out recently. Are you planning to do more, or is this not a plan/lack of plan thing but something that just happens in 1-7K word chunks?

I naturally write longer pieces, but recently I’ve done more short fiction—in part because my writing schedule is tight! If I have a burning idea that *can* be a short story, it’s much easier and more satisfying to get in and out in two or three thousand words than to spend nine months two years from now hammering it into shape.

Today I am hosting an interview with Ada Palmer, the latest stop on her blog tour for her new book Too Like the Lightning. I’ve attempted to avoid spoilers in both interview questions and review, although both refer to the contents; you can read my thoughts on the book here.

1) Are you in some sense a dual-vocateur, or is only one of writing and history your vocation? or are they the same vocation? or is something else “how you introduce yourself at parties” (cooking, singing, art appreciation)?

I introduce myself as both. I’ve been delighted to have a lot of readers respond enthusiastically to voker/vocateur, and I do think it’s something we see every day but don’t have a good name for, the difference between someone who works and then stops versus someone for whom work is an all-hours passion. We have “day job” but that implies that it’s somehow not important, not the real you, whereas I have friends who love their jobs and are great at them but are still happy that the job ends when they clock out. I like how voker/vocateur make clear that both kinds of relationship to one’s work are good and worthy of respect. For myself, history and writing are very much intertwined sets of one vocation, born mostly out of reading figures from the past. I talk in my author’s note at the end about what I call the Great Conversation, how authors in past eras responded to each other. It’s a conversation across time, years and decades of human labor poured into writing works for later generations to receive, in the pure faith that there will be yet more scholars in the future to read, and to respond. They worked so hard to pass things forward, copying them by hand as centuries made the papyrus crumble, and commenting and responding, continuing the conversation life by life. Petrarch did it most overtly. He wrote letters to Seneca and Cicero in response to reading their letters even though they had been dead a thousand years. And he also wrote a letter to Posterity, just the same way, addressed to the later scholars for whom he salvaged Cicero and Seneca, expecting us to pass it forward too. I want to read that, to discuss it, study it, share it with others, that’s the heart my scholarship, what I do as a historian and as a history professor. But I also want to do more. Petrarch didn’t want us to just measure and discuss him and his peers like so many specimens in a cabinet. He wanted us to reply. I don’t know how anyone can read Petrarch’s letters to us, and Voltaire’s, and Cicero’s, and not want to reply. To pass it forward. To pay it forward, all those years they gave us, trusting us, to give some years back, to them and to Posterity. So I replied. That’s the fiction. And, like them, I trust there will be more replies to come.

2) You spend much of your time teaching people who are “blessed with newness,” though less blessed than Bridger. How do you think your experience as a professor has changed how you write sensayers, caregivers, and others who interact with the young?

Interesting question. I think that transitioning from being taught to teaching has made me think a lot about what it was like being the student, doing a lot of analysis of points when I had good experiences with teachers, or bad ones, and trying to think from the other end what the big differences are. I think a lot of it has to do with whether the person in the teacher position thinks of the students as peers/people equivalent to the teacher, or whether the teacher categorizes students as other/separate. My worst student experiences tended to be situations where the teacher wouldn’t talk to us about why we were learning, what the bigger purpose was, and didn’t want to follow up probing questions. Situations where we were clearly units to be given information/instruction like so many potted plans to be given water. The best experiences were ones where teachers were eager to discuss the deeper purposes behind what we were learning, would step up at the outset to explain the why and what for, and the origins of things. I felt that a lot of the difference came from empathy, whether teachers thought of students as coequal human beings with a natural right to understand why, and to ask questions, like anyone in a normal conversation. When I write caregiver or teacher characters I think a lot about whether the caregiver/teacher thinks of interlocutors/students as equals, or as subjects to be protected/educated/guided by someone who knows better. Carlyle very much empathizes and everyone else as coequal participants in exploring something Carlyle just happens to have explored more than most. Other caregivers that we see have that to a lesser degree, or no degree. Set-sets bring out this tension a lot, since their seeming inhumanity makes it extra easy for people to see them as other/not self. The tension between good and bad teachers/caregivers, and the consequence of that difference for the world, will continue to grow over the four books.

3) Bash’es [deliberately formed quasi-family-type living groups] are of primary importance in this book, in this culture, but all the bash’es we see in serious detail are comparatively stable–that is, already formed. How tempted were you to do a side plot in bash’ formation? Can we hope for one in future books?

Yes, in fact I’m working at this very moment on a chapter which treats that quite a bit. The first part of this story focuses on the mature stages of large political plans and manipulations, and on the consequences of hereditary bash’es as opposed to new-formed bash’es. So it didn’t make sense for a young college-age new bash’ to be central to that action. I was also interested in focusing primarily on more mature characters, since there is already so much great genre fiction about young adults and coming-of-age, so it felt to me like I had more new things to contribute to a world of adults. But in the later books, as we see the consequences of these “days of transformation” Mycroft is describing, then there will be some attention to new bash’es, and in particular to how challenging and frightening it is to be in the midst of trying to form a new bash’ when all this occurs.

4) The Hives carefully all have strengths and appeal and weaknesses/downsides. Do you try to guess which Hive your friends would choose? Do you mostly guess right? Or do they let you pick for them?

The question is usually “What Hive would you be if you weren’t a Utopian?” Most of my friends are just as deep into science fiction & fantasy as I am, so Utopia is almost everyone’s first choice. But it’s fun asking people which other Hive they would pick. Sometimes people have an instant answer that feels exactly right, and you think “Yes, of course he’d be a Brillist,” but sometimes people are torn and we have a great discussion, and talk about the merits and appeals of each. It’s often especially interesting for noticing differences between friends, for example conversations where one friend finds the European and Mitsubishi Hives appealing because ancestry and nation of origin are important to that friend, and ethnicity/nationalism are important parts of those two Hives, but another friend in the same conversation may be baffled and find those two Hives totally unappealing. In the course of the conversation we discover how unimportant ancestry/nation is to that friend in contrast with the other. I think that many fictional stories sort people into groups by personality, or by the kinds of jobs people want to do, but fewer do it by political philosophy as Hives do, since they relate to fundamental ideas of how justice should work, or what the source of power is. I’ve never thought of trying to guess or assign Hives to others, though, I think of it as such a personal thing, it would be an invasion of privacy to impose it on someone. Some of my friends want to make an online quiz, which I think could be a lot of fun. And I’ve found it interesting that, while almost all my friends say “Utopia first!” I’ve had several friends be deeply torn between Utopia and Cousins, and feel they would have to reluctantly pick Cousins over Utopians. I think that the Cousins pull very differently from most of the Hives, based more on personality than philosophy in some senses, and it’s interesting to see the Cousins be the one that makes even SF fans torn. I look forward to seeing how those who identify with Cousins will respond to the later books, especially the fourth.

5) The Terra Ignota series is substantial–several volumes coming from Tor. Do you have plans to do any shorter work, either in other universes or in other times/places in this universe? Or is Terra Ignota taking up all your fictional time and energy for the moment?

I find short fiction extremely challenging, it’s never flowed well for me, even though I love reading short fiction, especially short mysteries and ghost stories. I read a lot more short fiction than novels, but writing is very difficult (for which reason I’m a huge admirer of how you pour out so much incredible short fiction! [hey, thanks!–ed.]) I have one standalone short story that I’ve been trying to finish for… an embarrassing number of years, and do hope to finish someday. I have one idea for a short story in the world of Terra Ignota, and I have the scene all picked out, but the structure of how to make it stand alone has never come. So it’s just the novels for now, unless I ever finally conquer that short story. But Terra Ignota isn’t taking up all my fictional energy right now, a lot of my energy is going into planning for the next couple of novel series I intend to start writing when Terra Ignota is finished. I spent five years world building Terra Ignota before I sat down to outline and then write it, so I have several other series that are in that long preparatory stage, including two complete worlds that are just about ready to be outlined and written, and a couple other worlds that need a few more years of work to fill in all the gaps.

Ada Palmer is a professor in the history department of the University of Chicago, specializing in Renaissance history and the history of ideas. Her first nonfiction book, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance, was published in 2014 by Harvard University Press. She is also a composer of folk and Renaissance-tinged a capella music, most of which she performs with the group Sassafrass. Her personal site is at adapalmer.com, and she writes about history for a popular audience at exurbe.com and about SF and fantasy-related matters at Tor.com.

This won’t make any sense unless you have read the story I posted as a Christmas present for you all–you still can read it, How to Wrap a Roc’s Egg, go ahead. But. My friend Mary has gone and written a poem to answer part of it. And she said I could post it for you to enjoy, so when you’ve finished the story, here is the poem.

Bosko the Bold’s Last Exploit

by Mary Alexandra Agner

I do miss tea, you know.

Iced especially, would be lovely

but the dreams of chill and clink

melt quickly under equator sun,

and canon fire lacks, as accompaniment.

I write with some regret, Anna—

not for the rocs themselves,

or breaking our agreement,

nor thirty years of high sea hijinks

helping myself to gold and spice,

yardarms and yeomen,

what books the babies let me read

between their dives of great destruction.

Nor all the stars that you will never see in Sweden.

I regret I took away your dream

even while you gave me one

I didn’t know held all my happiness.

I hope you got your tea, acres of plants

turning that northern light to tart

and complex on the taster’s tongue.

I hope this letter finds its way to you.

My notoriety is built on flame and claw

and once my last breath slips away

so will the rocs.

What fame I leave may be insufficient postage.

(Isn’t that lovely? I couldn’t be more pleased, both with the thing itself and with the meta-thing of it.)

So last week I spent a week in a beach house in Charleston doing the Starry Coast writers’ workshop with ten strangers. No longer strangers after a week together! I had very little idea what to expect, other than the immediate practicalities, but I went in with a great deal of hope, a bunch of chocolate to share, and a theory that I could deal with almost anything for a limited time.

It. Was. Great.

I am used to coming out of critiquing sessions and having to think a long time about what I want to do with the ideas I got there. While the ideas here were diverse and sometimes contradictory (as they should be!), I got so much clarity of path that I’ve been doing the revisions right away before my local writers’ group meeting, rather than waiting to triangulate from it. I really loved how much variety in project there was, and how the structure of the workshop let us line up with the manuscripts we had the most to say to in the in-depth critiques. I came out of it so energized and ready to do this project and also the next, completely unrelated one. I am also prepared to boost the other projects when they’re done and ready for some cheerleading, because there is some serious stuff going on there. You’ve seen the post-workshop smugs of, “I got to read that first!” before, and I’m sure you’ll see them again from me. (Because I did.)

When I’ve read other people talking about this sort of workshop setting in the past, they have burbled about sitting out on the porch looking at the ocean to critique their novels, and I have gone, yeah, okay, ocean, porch, whatever. But! We sat out on the porch looking at the ocean to critique our novels and it was so great! I think it was Desirina who pointed out that a certain amount of relaxation helps, and that was definitely the case here. For one of the crits it was raining gently. There were dolphins in the sea going by.

And the sea. Oh my dears.

So…the vertigo, as I told you before I left, continued terrible. But I wanted, oh, how I wanted, to go in the Atlantic anyway. In addition to having no sense of balance whatsoever, I have gas permeable contacts–you know, the little tiny ones that wash easily out of one’s eyes–and no sport goggles or even sport band for my glasses. So: no sense of balance, no ability to navigate the beach with my cane or get into the water safely, no ability to tell up from down once in the water, very limited vision.

I packed my swimsuit anyway. I knew I couldn’t do it by myself. I thought, well, if there isn’t a time when the weather is good, if there isn’t a way the beach is situated so I can do it with help…most importantly, if I don’t decide that I can trust anybody to help me…we’ll just see what happens. No assumptions.

You can see what’s coming. Everyone there, everyone, everyone was beyond wonderful about my vertigo. Seriously. All week long. I’m choking up writing this, because I literally cannot imagine that they could have been better if it had been planned around me, which of course it wasn’t. Nobody was sitting around fussing, that would have been far worse. People went off and did things without me that I couldn’t do all the time, and that was great, that was how it should be, because if they were hovering going, “Now…no one can do anything if Marissa can’t do it too!” that would have been awful. But. I cannot think of one single person who did not very casually help me out, offer assistance when it was needed, take a moment to seamlessly take their turn being the one to see that something was bothering me and lend a hand. Every. Last. Person.

If you haven’t dealt with a balance disorder, you might be thinking, oh, well, good, you got nice people. Or even “good people.” And I did. But nice people, good people, even people who know me well, screw this stuff up all the time. I’m pretty sure that at least one of the four people who kicked my cane out from under me coming home in the Atlanta airport was probably a very nice person–they just weren’t paying attention. For the workshop I got nice, good people who happened to be observant in the right ways to make dealing with my very nasty health problem as easy as it could possibly be under the circumstances. I am so grateful to every single one of them for that.

So on Friday when we didn’t have anything else going on, Molly and Michael helped me into the ocean. They each took an arm and held me steady, and they helped me out as deep as I wanted to go and let me experience it, vertigo and all. It was amazing. It was a three-dimensionally utterly disorienting experience, because the sand does what wet sand does under your feet, and so the only solid points of reference I had in the universe were their arms. But I felt utterly safe. They were not going to let anything happen to me. And Molly is a natural at guiding people with a balance disorder, saying what the terrain is going to do and what’s going to happen with the waves. In the middle of it all, the sun came out from clouds and was even more dazzling to my vision, and my inner ear started doing very slow backflips (that is, axis of reference doing complete spins so that up was at some points literally down), so if there was some kind of space station salt water sand and pool system, it would probably be very much like that, terrain leaving under your feet as you stepped, water coming up at intervals utterly unpredictable to you, light feeling more or less omnidirectional, only sensation and the safety of trust in other humans doing what they said they would.

I referred to going in afterwards as “sobering up,” because it very much was. The aftershocks stayed with my system significantly for hours and hours afterwards, the sensation in my feet and my balance system of who-knew-what. Unnerving. Fascinating. Worth it.

The thing about a balance disorder is that you get very accustomed to what you can and cannot do safely, and having something that feels new, that is new, but that is also completely safe–that’s rare and precious. I haven’t captured a tenth of it here. It was a great gift.

There were other lovely things that were much more mundane and easy to describe–cooking and eating other people’s cooking/baking, going out for meals, going to the Hunley museum, playing games, hanging out talking until all hours, companionable reading in the common living area–so great, so great.

I’m paying for it now. I did basically the second half of the workshop entirely on adrenaline. Food is not at all my friend right now (I failed at gelato, just for reference–I made a try at a bowl of homemade gelato and failed), and I am so disoriented that when I woke up in the middle of the night the other night, I had zero physical cues for where I might be. Like, up, down, sideways, who even knows. It was the level of disorientation where you hold very still because the bed might or might not decide to abandon you, and without any sense of gravity, you have no idea which direction will be the wrong one that will make it do that. So I’m trying to get a little better rested, hoping that the meds will kick in (ANY MINUTE NOW DAMMIT)…and still revising this novel as many hours a day as I can manage, because the next one is breathing down its neck.

Everyone needs to spend time on how to get better. No matter what stage you’re at, no matter what kind of thing you’re doing, you need to spend the time with other people examining it, turning it over, thinking about what makes it work and what could make it work better. And this was a week dedicated to that in some very concrete ways. I wish that for all of you, whatever it is that you’re doing, at whatever level.

So: workshop. Yeah. Hell yeah.

I didn’t catch up on things like posting the link to the interview F&SF did about my story, and then tonight I saw a best stories of the year so far link on IO9 mentioning that very same story. I am pleased and abashed and feeling like I am not doing my share to promote the issue of F&SF it’s in. But honestly, at the moment the thing about “I would forget my head if it wasn’t attached” is particularly apropos because it doesn’t feel as though it is. So if there’s something I should be doing for you in the next little bit and you’re afraid I’ve forgotten, please remind me! I don’t mean to have forgotten.

Oh, one last somewhat relevant thing in that regard: I had already read Robert’s gorgeous first novel The Glittering World before the workshop, and now I know him, and he is doing an audiobook Kickstarter! Audiobooks are important for access! Audiobooks are fun for the whole family!…um…the whole parts of the family you will allow to listen to really dark fantasy, anyway. Maybe just the more grown-up parts of the family in this case. Anyway, go check it out.

There is a curious hollow feeling that comes from sending a draft of novel off to be critiqued.

It has been eating focus, attention, concentration, energy–it has been monopolizing as much brain as is available and then some–and now it is done. Gone. Off to other garner other people’s thoughts. Not productive to fiddle with it any more for awhile, and yet not done either.

I’m doing something new this time. I’m going off for a week at the end of September to participate in a peer workshop–other people who have had either novels or a bunch of short stories published will converge on an undisclosed location, and we will all critique each other’s openings, and then we will do smaller-group in-depth critiques later in the week. (Seriously I’m not sure how undisclosed it’s supposed to be, I just haven’t seen anyone else talking about the details, so I’m staying vague.) I sent them a draft of Itasca Peterson, Wendigo Hunter. And we’ll see how this goes. I don’t know any of these people very well, but their work is cool, so that feels, if anything, even more interesting than if it was a retreat with people who were already close friends. And then I will come home and do critiques of the same work with people I know much better, so parallax is our friend, people, parallax is definitely our friend.

And…this is a thing I honestly love about writing. I really, really love this. If you catch me in the wrong mood, I will wax sentimental and get a little choked up. Because in writing, in speculative fiction in particular, we take it for granted–it is a totally normal thing to do–that we will get to look at other people’s awesome things and help make them a little more awesome. Think about that for a moment. There are some other jobs for which it works that way, sure–for which a project is primarily someone else’s and it is assumed that you will get to take your time and help make it better. But mostly not. Mostly you are either working together on something or you’re not helping.

I like helping.

I like cooperation.

Last weekend we had a marathon crit session for someone in my regular group. We hadn’t met for several months, but there we were, back at it again, here’s what I think the heart of this book is, here’s what I think didn’t quite do what you wanted it to, have a homemade cookie and enhance the emotional core of your creative work.

Isn’t that an awesome thing?

Well, I think it is.

So I am behind on all sorts of things. Like, I have not posted about my story “Ten Stamps Viewed Under Water,” which is in F&SF for Sept/Oct, and I have not posted about Alec’s story either, and I have generally had my head in fierce 11-year-olds who hunt monsters. But honestly that is a great place to have my head, and I like it. And also in crits, and I will continue to have my head there for awhile.

And also I get to write short stories now, and you can’t imagine how excited I am. Maybe you can. But honestly I am one of those people who likes to write rather than liking to have written, so it was less “Yay book done” and more “Yay get to write stories now whew.”

Except for having to take days off sometimes. That’s still a thing.

But yeah. A curious hollow feeling. And a love of cooperation. That’s where we are right now. Hi.

The schedule for 4th St. Fantasy is up, and it starts today! We’ll be heading up there to settle into the hotel and do evening events tonight. I’m leading the seminar starting at 9:00 tomorrow morning, but all the spots in that are full. You can still get a convention membership, though! And here are the panels you can hear me on if you do:

What’s up with our perpetual fascination with breaking society and dramatizing the apocalypse as well as the post-apocalypse… how do our cultural myths and societal images intersect with this phenomenon and fuel it (the manor house cozy catastrophe of British fiction, the American narrative of rugged survivalists gunning their way across the ungoverned wastes, etc.)? We’ve seen that national powers can remain in control and national identities remain concrete even when bombs are literally falling from the sky. So why do we seem so convinced that if our society hits the rocks we’ll never get it off again?

The challenges, structural concerns, and tricks of crossing two or more established genres in one book. How the beats fall differently, how to manage different sets of expectations, etc.

Note: the schedule has all of Sunday’s panels listed as PM. This is wrong. I know because I am never, never, never on a panel starting at 10:00 p.m. You think I flap my hands and call things “thingy” and “whatsit” ordinarily…you should see me in the 2200 hour.

Anyway! If you are noticing that I seem to be starting the convention every morning, you are correct! I am the Designated Fourth Street Morning Person. Rise and shine and geek out with meeeee!

So it turns out there’s a lot of stuff I like. I like our new dishwasher and how it sings a happy song when it’s done–oh, I am unreasonably gleeful about that dishwasher. I like the fact that strawberries are in season. But that’s not why I’m doing these round-up posts–I’m doing an every-so-often post of short stories I’ve read and liked, that you might like too. Or you can link things you’ve liked in the comments! Up to you.

This weekend I sold a story, “Draft Letter on Research Potential Suggested by Recent Findings in Gnome Genomics,” to EGM Shorts. It started with an offhand tweet about how I have to read carefully because both gnome and genome are words my friends could reasonably be writing to me, and then it snowballed from there into a short-short. I love all the writing I get to do, but honestly when it’s something full-out gleefully weird like this, I just feel like I’m getting away with something. The rule that I should never, ever say, “But who would want something that peripheral/oddball?” is being reinforced by this sort of sale. I should just write things, and we live in a future where there’s some chance that people can be united with their chosen weirdnesses.

Which reminds me of my friend Mary’s Patreon project. Mary proposes to write science news poetry: poems about scientific advances and concepts that have been in the news each month. She is already an accomplished poet and nerd, so this project would give support to focusing those talents. And honestly, $1/month is not very much for a bunch of cool science poems. Certainly not much to help bring them into existence. Because honestly, this is the kind of future I want to live in: the kind where the stuff about which I would have said, “Can you do that?” when I was a teenager is out there being done, with joy and verve and–what was that last bit, Bull Durham?–oh yes: poetry.

Magazines. We really, really like magazines that publish short stories. (Y’know. Like the ones we write.) Which is why I commend to your attention the Kickstarter for Uncanny magazine. It’s the new project from the twisty, uncanny brains of the Thomases, who used to work with Apex and who were some of the editors I worked with on the Apex story some of you may have enjoyed earlier this summer. If I listened carefully (I’m pretty tired, so you should go listen carefully yourself), it looks like their business model is to have subscribers get an early e-book version of the magazine and then provide the stories online for the general reader, so if you help fund, there’s more stories for you early and then more stories for everyone eventually. I think pretty much everyone who reads this can get behind that idea.

So: Thomases! Weird speculative fiction projects! Track record good, outlook positive, go think about their new thing and whether you have two dimes to rub together and throw into making it go.

Today is Sunday, and my birthday is Saturday. I have already read two books (one paper, one ebook) that were early birthday presents, because I am spoiled and because apparently the concept of delayed gratification is not a strong suit at the moment. Anyway, in making a dinner reservation for this evening, I got asked, is it anybody’s birthday? and usually I lie and tell them no, because I don’t want to make the waitstaff feel obliged to sing as well as their real jobs, and I worry that they will give me a nasty piece of white cake instead of letting me decide whether I want good dessert or no dessert. But this time I chirped, “Yes, it’s mine!” Because this year, honestly, with all the horrible and disappointing news the world has brought us in the last week, I kind of feel the need for all the birthday assistance I can get.

This post is a list of things you can think about getting for yourself–or just drooling over if you don’t have the spare cash–as presents for yourself for my birthday. Sadly, I can’t get them for all of you. I am not that much of a wealthy hobbit, to be able to buy all of you these lovely things as presents for my birthday. But I will at least show you the shinies that I would get you, if I could have a proper hobbit party and give you all the proper hobbit presents that I would like to give you. (Please note that this is the opposite of the usual wishlist: I am not asking you to get this stuff for ME but for YOURSELVES. Not that I wouldn’t like it also, but some of it–like the Kickstarter stuff–I already have, and mostly: the point is you, not me.)

1. Nerd coloring books. Specifically, Dinosaurs With Jobs. Mostly I would get this for my old college friend Scott, but the rest of you might want it too.

5. Tim always has lovely things. Here are two of his newerones (that first link was from the Pop Art Minneapolis series, the second the newest Reader photo).

6. Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky are doing a Kickstarter. For those of us who have been yearning for another Cry Cry Cry album, even two-thirds as good will almost certainly be good enough. (Did you miss out on Cry Cry Cry? Here they are singing Northern Cross. The third member is Dar Williams. Oh, fine, here’s another: By Way of Sorrow.)

7. Julie Dillon, who has done the gorgeous art for my Tor.com stories, is also doing a Kickstarter. Many ways to support her art; go look.

Any other loveliness you want to share with each other? There’s a whole week before it’s my birthday, and the comments section lies before you.

1. Some of you have already heard this on other social media, but this week I sold a short story, “The New Girl,” to Apex Magazine. Hurrah! Apex will be publishing another short story in the same universe (but not with any recognizably similar elements) next week, so stay tuned.

2. Marie Brennan is doing a Kickstarter for a novel. Chains and Memory will be the sequel to her previous novel, Lies and Prophecy, and you can get them both. Notice how I am saying “will be” and “can get”? That’s because the Kickstarter has already funded. But there are stretch goals, so go give it a look. (Even when there aren’t stretch goals, usually the funding goal for a Kickstarter is not the point at which the project creator starts swimming, Scrooge McDuck style, in vats of money and can make all the cool things in the world happen without anxiety, related to their project. Backers can always back out, expenses always exist. If you think a Kickstarter looks like a good idea from a trustworthy source, overfunding a bit it is nearly always a good idea.)

3. Hanne Blank is doing a new subscription project called 52 Weeks To Your Best Body Ever. Unlike most projects of this type, it will not be strictly gendered, focused on “bikini bodies,” or anything weird and icky like that. This is a “feel better in your skin” sort of project. (It’s Hanne, so there may also be a few “make your skin feel better” things, I don’t know.) I’ve enjoyed Hanne’s previous subscription project, which was recipe focused, and I think she’s got a lot to say here that will be of value to a wide variety of people.

1. I sold a story, “A House of Gold and Steel,” to Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It’s not actually very much like “Minnie the Moocher,” although that’s where the title comes from. When I announced this on shorter social media, I linked to Cab Calloway singing in Blues Brothers, which is classic, but I also always do get Stephen Fry in my head saying, “Yes, His Majesty King Gustav does seem to have been extraordinarily generous with the young lady, sir.” But really, His Majesty King Gustav is Sir Not Appearing In This Story.

2. Tim’s Kickstarter funded! If you’re interested, there’s still time to back it and get yourself a lovely photo book, or the related cards, prints, etc. This is a thing that will definitely happen now–he’s completed all the photos, the Kickstarting is for the cost of printing etc.–and as Kev said in another social medium, it is a lovely bandwagon to jump on. Mostly I am pleased that it funded before the last minute. You may not have known this about me, but I am not the least anxious person ever, and knowing that this very cool project will actually exist in the world has been a very happy relief for me.

3. It’s raining. I like rain. I like rain almost as well as snow, and everybody else is a great deal less grumpy than if it was snowing today, so hurrah rain.

Today is Monday, and Tim’s Kickstarter is over 75% funded. The funding is the point at which it can happen, though; going over “funded” is still quite a good idea and gives more room for him to develop awesome projects in future.

Saturday is my mother’s sixtieth birthday. Don’t you think my mother should have nice things? I do. Like beautiful photo books. And kooky fantasy stories. She likes things like that!

That’s why for this week, as a special promotional for my mom’s birthday, if you back the Reader: War for the Oaks Kickstarter at the photo book level or higher (that’s $30 or higher), you can let me know and pick your own brand new Carter Hall story. Choose a title (I’ve never written “Carter Hall Returns to the Point” or “Carter Hall’s One Timer” or “Carter Hall and the Broken Blade” or…well, that’s the point, whatever you like), or choose a mythic or folktale element I should incorporate in a new Carter Hall story. I’ll send it to you when it’s finished.

There is no requirement that you have to be listed as a friend of my lj or anything else to participate in this promotional. My email is publicly available: it’s a gmail account at marissalingen.

The Kickstarter is up for The Reader: War for the Oaks, and Tim has done a beautiful job. You can see some of how gorgeous the photos are on the page for it, but they’re even better in person. There’ll also be essays in appreciation of War for the Oaks in the photo book (possibly one from me–we’ll see what he thinks!). And if you’re so moved, there are gorgeous prints and photo cards for extras. Some of you have gotten examples of Tim’s photo cards in the mail from me–way better than Hallmark, frankly, suitable for pretty much any occasion, festive, congratulatory, consoling, pick your mood yourself.

This has been a lovely project to support, and I would really like for him to be able to do more beautiful nerdy things in this vein. The Kickstarter is starting strong, but it still needs support. Please go look at the page and think about backing it. Thanks so much.

I have a friend who has developed an academic interest in what she terms neo-Victorian kids’ lit (/MG) and YA. I have asked, and she does not draw a firm line between that and steampunk. Recommendations, anti-recommendations, interesting works to discuss: go.

I’ll start: Chris Moriarty’s The Inquisitor’s Apprentice fills my heart with joy, and I only wish she would write another, or I only wish they would publish another, or something. (That is, however, Victorian era but US setting. Not sure if it matters. Friend can show up and say so if it does.)

Another awesome photo project that you, Twin Cities people or people who are visiting the Twin Cities soon, can help with! War for the Oaks Reader Photos. Awesome, or awesome? Yes. Awesome. Check it out. Be a WFTO reader. It will be good.

Yesterday I got the e-mail (and phone call! and phone call to the other line!) I had been expecting for the last few weeks: management was canceling more of the Minnesota Orchestra's concerts, including the Dvorak and Bartok I was looking forward to in late January. The management is trying to claim credit for being the flexible ones for inviting the musicians back to the table to talk, but we all remember who did the locking out. The fact that they have paired this request for conversation with more cancellations makes it clear that they were just hoping the musicians would say, "Okay, never mind, we'll do everything you want." Sigh. And of course there's an attempt to distract from the inquiries about misuse of funds.

But the line that really got me is the title of this post: "You do not need to take any immediate action." I read that and I started laughing. I beg to differ, Orchestra Management! Orchestra patrons do need to take immediate action. We need to keep contacting the people in charge of this and making it clear what we think of their behavior. The patron comment line is listed on the Minnesota Orchestra website. But that's pretty far away from where you are now and would require looking, so I will just give it to you! It's (612) 373-9204. That's (612) 373-9204! If you call that number, you can leave your comments with an answering machine--you don't have to worry about what you will say and what they will say and what you will say back. You just get to have your say.

There are other things you can do listed on the Minnesota Orchestra Musicians' page. They have addresses for ease in contacting the appropriate politicians and public figures. Go forth! Take immediate action!

I don't know if it's clear why I'm doing this, why I'm talking about this particular thing so much when there are so many things that are problematic. And one, I love music in many varieties, and really great classical music is under serious threat in my city, and I think in my country. But one of the reasons why I feel like this is my fight inasmuch as I can find fight in me to apply beyond the immediate realms is that I kind of feel like we're all in this together. I mean people in the arts, but also more generally people trying to do something amazing. Something awesome. Something creative not in its woobly wishy-washy modern application, but in very concrete terms: this thing did not exist in this form before, and I created it. This loaf of bread, this poem, this theory, this performance. That's important.

In some ways my geek angst in junior high and high school--even in grade school--does not align with the cultural narrative, and one of the clearest ways in which that misalignment is true is the "geeks vs. jocks" meme. I never felt like I was at war with the jocks or was being persecuted by them or anything like that. The jocks were a bunch of people who cared about stuff. What we are fighting against--consciously, constantly--is the forces of apathy and neglect. We can all be in that together. And we can all use what we've got in that fight, and what I've got--other than a boatload of cookies this time of year--is words. If the Orchestra needed someone to be on their side who could do kickass graphic design, they would have to keep looking. But words, we can do words. We have those here.

In the church in which I grew up, people learned not to go to the senior pastor and say, "SOMEbody should blah blah blah," because he would make sure--sometimes subtly, sometimes not--that they would throw back their shoulders, lift up their chins, and say in a proud and happy voice, "I--am--somebody!" Well, folks, you are somebody. If you care about classical music, if you care about unions, if you care about the Minnesota Legislature having a handle on where their funds are going, this is for you. It doesn't have to be your fight 24/7. But it can be little pieces of your fight, if you want it to.

Mary Alexandra Agner is doing a Kickstarter that has me all excited, possibly because of the Lego Millikan Oil Drop setup but mostly because it's Mary. It's a chapbook of linked stories about a girl scientist doing famous experiments. Today, for your reading pleasure, we have an in-character interview with Olivia. If you like her, support her in her science work! Or, more realistically, support her creator's art and Kickstarter. Go Mary go!

1) When did you get your robot?

Two years, five days, and 12 minutes ago. I had broken my doll, Froggie, trying to dissect her and Mom was too sick of the smell of formaldehyde to get me another. Aunty Peg saved the day by sending Bot, who doesn't care so much if I peek at his insides. There was a whole card with just LEDs blinking randomly and I figured out how to program it to blink different colors depending on Bot's distance from objects!

2) What experiment design do you think would be hardest to convince your parents to let you replicate?

Anything too big to fit in my room, I think. They don't like it when I tear up the back yard. If I can clean up after it, then I think it will be okay. Disposing of hazardous waste might be hard, so something small and not to dangerous, I guess. Bummer.

3) What part of your summer experiments do you most wish you could take back to school with you?

Sometimes I keep small pieces of whatever I'm working on in my pockets or my purse. If I had to shave something down or clip wires, I'll carry the extras around just to remind me that I can figure things out. There's the Internet, the library, people I know, and me! But I like the banana clip or burnt-out resistor to wrap my hand around to remind me that I am creative. Sometimes at school it's hard to figure out how everything relates back to science, even though all the teachers tell me it does, so that's when my little creative bits make a difference.

4) Has the weather ever interfered with one of your experimental parameters in an unexpected way? (humidity, electrical discharge...?)

Last summer I had managed to convince a couple of girls from school to measure the Earth's circumference with me like Eratosthenes did, er, mostly. There was a lot of whining about how hot it was and why weren't we playing in the shade and all, but it clouded over just at noon! So we couldn't measure the elevation of the sun and they went off to do something else and made fun of me for a while. Sokay, though, since they really wanted to talk to me about the transit of Venus this year and they thought I was kinda cool since I already knew stuff.

5) When you're not doing your experiments, what do you do for fun?

Geocaching! I get to go hiking (fav thing number 2) with my GPS (fav thing number 1) and no one looks at me funny! Mom and Dad went with me just last weekend and it was great. We picnicked (barbecue! fav thing number 3) and my Dad stopped and sketched some of the woods (he's a muralist) with me and Mom and my GPS in them.